The Female Emperor Gossiped and Gossiping in Luoyang

As the only female emperor in Chinese history, Wu Zhao (624–705) has been catching much of people’s attention. However, conventional historical works, closely manipulated by elite scholar-officials, provided little reliable or useful information on the six decades of her dominance at the court. I choose the aspect of gossip to approach the female emperor in a much noisier metropolitan space of Luoyang, since gossip is in essence evaluative social talk, its topic is about individuals who are not present, and its content is sometimes real, sometimes not, and sometimes beside the point. Judging from these three aspects, Wu Zhao, as gossipee and as gossiper, could and did inspire good gossip. By investigating the specific social contexts in which gossips about her and by her were produced, circulated, and controlled, I make a foray into presenting Wu and her Divine Capital through a lens traditionally considered dubious. Nonetheless, this dubiety reveals the subtle prejudice and stereotype against women deeply rooted in the medieval Chinese society, and shrewdly yet doggedly defended in historical records of various types. Profound awareness of the prejudice will help us to better understand and evaluate the reign of the female emperor, and the impact she posed on the patriarchal urban society. Furthermore, I argue that a cityscape filled with incidents as well as various noises is in fact closer to the historical accuracy and actuality of a society in its entirety, and that Luoyang existed both as historical facts and in the metropolitan hustle and bustle saturated with gossip. This is the historical accuracy of an urban society in its entirety.